Looker Netherlands

📢 Mark your calendars — the 8th Looker Community Event is coming! 🚀

📅 Date: Thursday, October 23rd
⏰ Time: 4:00 PM - 6:30 PM
📍 Location: Google Amsterdam, 8th floor, Claude Debussylaan 34, Amsterdam

Get ready for the 8th Looker Community Event! For this event, we’re heading back to familiar ground — Google Amsterdam. With space for around 100 attendees, be sure to register early to secure your spot!

Talks:

• Nudging merchants for smoother refunds: Building a Recommendation Engine with BigQuery, Pub/Sub, and Looker by Sjoerd van der Schaar, Analytics Engineering Manager at Mollie
• From Decibels to Dashboards: How Looker Drives Decisions in the Festival Industry by Paul Ailes, Senior Data Analyst at Superstruct Entertainment & Jeroen Visser, CTO at i-Spark
• Managing Crystalloids from Spreadsheets to Looker on Google Cloud Platform by Jeanne-Marie Gerber, Solutions Engineer at Crystalloids

Agenda

• 15:45-16:15: Walk-in
• 16:15-16:45: Speaker 1
• 16:45-17:15: Speaker 2
• 17:15-17:30: Short Break
• 17:30-18:00: Speaker 3
• 18:00: Drinks & Social

More detailed information about the talks below:

Sjoerd van der Schaar, Mollie - Nudging merchants for smoother refunds: Building a Recommendation Engine with BigQuery, Pub/Sub, and Looker
Ever bought something online, returned it, and then waited ages for your money back? This delay isn't just frustrating for you; it's a critical business problem for the merchant, often caused by a low account balance that prevents them from processing refunds instantly.

At Mollie, we tackled this head-on. Using our rich payments data, we built a recommendation engine that calculates the optimal balance a merchant should hold to ensure they can always process refunds smoothly.

This system uses BigQuery to power the calculations, sends recommendation events to our application via Pub/Sub, and leverages Looker dashboards to track how merchants respond to our recommendations. This allows us to constantly monitor, learn, and iterate.

The results after one year proved its worth: a 46% increase in average merchant balances and a 60% decrease in delayed refunds. In this talk, Sjoerd will walk you through the journey of building this data product, from initial analysis to measuring impact.

About the Speaker
Sjoerd van der Schaar is Analytics Engineering Manager at Mollie where he leads a team of analytics engineers that focus on creating data products around the expanding set of financial services that Mollie offers. Sjoerd specialises in building data products around event streams with tooling such as dbt, Bigquery, Pub/Sub and Looker.

Paul Ailes & Jeroen Visser, Superstruct Digital Services & i-Spark - From Decibels to Dashboards: How Looker Drives Decisions in the Festival Industry
What happens when data meets the festival world? Jeroen from i-spark & Paul from Superstruct Digital Services will show how Looker helps festival teams across Europe understand their audiences, track ticket sales in real time, and plan better events. From ticketing data pipelines to embedded dashboards, you’ll see how they collaborate to bring data to life for creative, non-technical users — and what’s next with AI-powered analytics and self-serve exploration.

About the Speakers
Paul is a Senior Data Analyst at Superstruct Digital Services, where he helps deliver data products and insights that power some of Europe’s biggest festivals. With over 15 years of experience in business intelligence across a range of industries, Paul has built a career around helping teams understand and get the most out of their data.
Originally from the UK, Paul moved to the Netherlands in 2016 — drawn by its thriving festival scene. Now, at Superstruct, he’s been able to bring together his professional expertise and personal passion for festivals, working closely with teams to turn untapped datasets into actionable insights.

Jeroen Visser is the CTO of i-spark, a pragmatic, down‑to‑earth team of data and AI experts. Building cloud‑based data platforms, integrating diverse data sources and delivering two concrete outputs: clear insights and automated enriched data feeds.
With over seventeen years of experience in data strategy, engineering and analytics, he leads i-spark’s technical vision and innovation journey.
As both CTO and solutions architect, Jeroen enjoys connecting business ambitions with technical execution, supporting teams to turn challenges into practical data and AI solutions that scale. His work centers on modern data and AI platforms built with tools such as Snowflake, dbt and Looker; with a strong focus on security, governance and privacy-by-design principles.

Jeanne-Marie Gerber, Crystalloids - Managing Crystalloids from Spreadsheets to Looker on Google Cloud Platform
Crystalloids is a Google Cloud Premier Partner, founded by Richard Verhoeff and led with dedication for over fourteen years. Our certified specialists help companies innovate and grow with customized data solutions, from applications to advanced data and analytics platforms.

What makes our story unique is that we live what we build. At Crystalloids, we integrate our business tools: Google Workspace, Hubspot, Jira, Exact Online, HR, and even NS Zakelijk on Google Cloud with Looker. This enables us to break down silos and gain near real-time insights into our key KPIs across marketing, sales, projects, products, people, and margins.

From a company of two people working with spreadsheets, we have transformed into a data-driven organization powered by Google Cloud and Looker—delivering responsible, scalable, and actionable insights for ourselves and our clients.

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